Humans are not capable of safely operating motor vehicles. For a combination of practical and psychological reasons, we accept them as safe enough, stuffing the tens of thousands of Americans who get mowed down each year into the backs of our heads. But we know what the genuinely safe version of human-operated vehicles looks like, because we do it for planes, and it involves quite a lot of complex instruments other than the human eyeball.

It would be an absolute catastrophe for the developers of autonomous vehicles to decide there's no need to do better than human drivers.

Human drivers don't use fixed cameras. For one thing, they can move their heads.

Fun fact, people can see light polarization.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4528539/

> But I note that human drivers do not rely on LIDAR or radar or a high res map of the road.

Human drivers also have a brain that computers have struggled to replicate for decades.

Also, many of the Chinese vehicle makers already include LIDARs in their vehicles for their current ADAS

Human eyes and vision system are so much better than current cameras and GPUs they aren't really comparable.

Also we should be aiming at creating autonomous driving systems that are SAFER than humans and this requires as many sensor modalities as possible. Vision + LIDAR + Radar + Sonar + terahertz Radar.

Terahertz radar is a very interesting new kind of radar. https://teradar.com/

Are there any successful autonomous driving systems that don't use lidar?

Sure, Wayve did some experiments with just radar + vision, but now incorporate lidar across their fleet. Waymo, Pony.ai, and WeRide have always used it.

You can shout "you don't need it!" as loud as you like, but the people who are actually building and running these systems seem to disagree.